Saratoga National Historical Park celebrates 75 years with events

STILLWATER -- Saratoga National Historical Park is celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2013 with a variety of events throughout the year.

The history-changing battles fought there took place in September and October 1777, but another 161 years passed before the site joined the National Park system in 1938.

A major commemoration is planned for June 1, at the place on modern-day Route 4 where British Gen. John Burgoyne surrendered his sword to American Gen. Horatio Gates.

"The more you get into this place, the more you realize how remarkable the things are that happened here," said Dick Farrell, Friends of Saratoga Battlefield president. "The Americans defeated a British army capable of beating any European power."

The groundwork for a national park started long before 1938, as early as the late 19th century. Back then, the land was still in private hands, largely used by farmers who would regularly unearth artifacts and occasionally human remains while plowing their fields.

"Farmers would pay kids to follow behind, pick up whatever they found and put it in a nickel cigar box," park ranger Joseph Craig said.

By 1877, Saratoga's 100th anniversary, the Civil War was fresh in most people's minds. Ellen Hardin Walworth, of Saratoga Springs, whose ancestor Lt. John Hardin had fought at Saratoga, was concerned that people were forgetting about the Revolution.

Walworth co-founded Daughters of the American Revolution and is responsible for getting a series of granite markers erected that direct people from Saratoga Springs to the battlefield, along with monuments at the battlefield itself. The markers are among the first examples of historical tourism in America.

The state acquired the property in 1926, one year before the battles' sesquicentennial in 1927, which brought out an amazing throng estimated at 160,000 people.

"There was a huge pageant," Craig said. "Dancers from Skidmore College used large white sheets to symbolize glaciers that once covered this area. There was a 1,000-voice chorus and a brass band. It was quite unlike anything you'd see today."

George Washington once visited the battlefield toward the end of the Revolution, as did presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams after they left office.

However, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a former New York governor, was the driving force behind the battlefield gaining national park status. Many other historic sites joined the park system during his administration.

In October 1940, FDR paid an unexpected visit to the battlefield with less than 24 hours notice.

A Civilian Conservation Corps team, based in Stillwater, was called in to quickly build a crude road for him to view the setting.

"They were literally tamping it down as he drove in up in his open touring car," Craig said. "He reportedly leaned out and asked the work crew, 'Hey boys! How we doing?' The mud was still wet on their shovels."

At that time, the landscape had been mostly cleared for farming.

"It looked like the battles had been fought at a golf course," Craig said. "So in the 1950s they did a reforestation project to make it look more like it did in 1777."

The elevated vantage point FDR visited became the site of today's Visitors Center, which opened in October 1962 at the height of the Cold War. The building's basement was built as a bomb shelter with an escape tunnel in the event of a nuclear attack.

Opening ceremonies were led by Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the superintendent at West Point, who later commanded U.S. military operations in Vietnam during the war's peak.

The tour road that thousands of visitors now use was added some years later.

Today, the 3,500-acre park consists of the battlefield and four ancillary sites -- Saratoga Monument, Victory Woods, Schuyler House and the Sword Surrender Site, which is still under development.

How important was Saratoga?

"If you go to the Capitol Building rotunda in Washington, D.C., there are only eight paintings that depict scenes from early American history," Farrell said. "One of them is the Surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga."